A Nation Respects

It was 50 years ago today that Winston Churchill was given a state funeral.

Like so many people, I have watched and been moved by the BBC documentary that recaptured this event, even speaking to many of the people that took part in some way and yet remain alive to speak of this important moment of national mourning.

I am shocked by the news that a recent survey of British students revealed that they had almost no knowledge about this man.

The most telling thing was that most students associated Churchill with the bulldog that has been the advertising device of an insurance company.

It is unfortunate that I was not one of those people surveyed about their knowledge of who this man was.

But of course, I am in my early 50s, and perhaps an unusual interest in such history, because my parents were of that generation that lived through the war and that Britain fought, at first alone, although always with the critical resources of the then British Empire to draw upon.

My father died in 1998, many years ago now, but my mother remains alive at the grand age of 95.

This I suppose I have had a direct connection to that struggle and to the way in which it has affected the lives of the generation that lived through it.

My father was a dock worker, commencing work within the Port of London authority when he was little more than 14 years of age.

As a dock worker, he had very particular reasons to perhaps mistrust Churchill, but in my father’s case I never heard this view expressed.

On the contrary, though a reserved occupation during the war, he and several others that were colleagues working in the docks, joined up as soon as war was declared, and in his case, he spent the next nine years in the forces, finally being mobilised from Palestine in 1948.

He and my mother had only married in 1938, no doubt because of the crisis that he would have laid down his life for.

The way my father told it to me was that by so doing, rather than waiting for conscription to call upon men like him, he was able to have more choice about how he could serve.

As a consequence of which, he served in the Royal Engineers, remaining throughout his service a private, and although briefly promoted to lance corporal, he was a private when demobilised.

I never did quite understand the reasons behind this, but besides a small number of simple stories he spoke little about his experiences.

It must have been hard for both of them to have spent the first 10 years of marriage separated because of the war, and there is no doubt that his experiences were behind his lifelong passion for pigeon racing, a solitary hobby that he shared with so many men that had served as he had.

Living within easy reach of the docks in which he worked, at the heart of East London, my mother was perhaps fortunate to have been engaged in war work which took her away from the constant bombing of that part of London.

At one stage she worked in an armaments factory somewhere in the Home Counties, and later moved to Lancashire where close to Blackpool she worked as a lathe operator.

He spoke of many different theatres of war, particularly of the desert war against Rommel.

He was at Tobruk, and rather than becoming involved in the D-Day invasion, he was part of the second and lesser known invasion through Italy that was part of the pincer movement to trap the axis powers through a second front.

I could not fail to become interested in the history of this struggle because of my parents part in it, and when I was quite young, I remember reading his doctors account of Churchill’s last years.

There is another reason why I have an interest in this moment of history, so much talked about, and so important to the national consciousness.

My father was one of 12 brothers and sisters, brought up in the east end of London to a typical working-class family.

One of his sisters married a man who was up until Churchill’s funeral in receipt of a small pension.

The family story does not go into too much detail, but apparently this arose from an indiscretion on the part of a member of the Marlborough family with someone that was in service at Blenheim Palace.

This particular branch of my family lived somewhere in Wiltshire, and were the only part of the family to have been able to make something of their lives, perhaps with the assistance of this pension.

With so many people in service in Britain during the 19th and 20th centuries, I am sure that there are numerous families that have some similar story somewhere in their ancestry.

But it is something that today’s anniversary reminds me of, and doubly so as I watched the way the cranes dipped to honour the passing of his funeral barge along the Thames.